Suzy Joeckel is a Professional EOS Implementer and fractional integrator. Before becoming an Implementer, she built and sold her own businesses, served as COO for multiple companies, and led sales operations for a major wealth education brand.
Today she holds two complementary seats — implementing EOS for client companies while also running fractional integrator engagements — which gives her a rare view of how EOS works from inside the business and outside of it. She began using Strety with her clients after testing it with a software company that was unhappy with their existing tool.
Table of Contents
- Before you were an EOS Implementer, you were building and scaling companies yourself. What did that path look like?
- How did you discover EOS?
- You self-implemented first. What made you eventually start working with an Implementer?
- What made you decide to become an Implementer yourself?
- You kept integrating even after you became an Implementer. Why?
- You work with a lot of integrators. What are the challenges you see them face most often?
- Do you ever do both for the same client — integrate and implement?
- What’s the difference between installing EOS and living it?
- If you had to pick the one EOS tool that makes the biggest impact, what would it be?
- How do you get teams to actually live the Accountability Chart week to week, not just build it and check in on it quarterly?
- You’ve used just about every tool out there — Bloom Growth, Ninety, EOS One, ClickUp, Asana, Trello, Zoho. What do you look for in software that supports EOS?
- Before Strety, how were you managing your work as an integrator?
- You mentioned Strety projects specifically. How do projects fit into your work as an implementer and integrator?
- How does the Strety Projects view change what you can see as an integrator?
- What kinds of projects do you typically build in Strety? Can you give some examples?
- How has Strety changed the way you actually run your sessions as an Implementer?
- For someone who’s tempted to build their own system in Google Sheets or Docs, what would you tell them?
Before you were an EOS Implementer, you were building and scaling companies yourself. What did that path look like?
My first job out of college was the fourth hire at a tech start-up that’s now a billion-dollar company. By year two we had 750 salespeople and I was running the New York Metro region at 23. It was nuts, but an invaluable experience to watch a company scale at that level. You start to see the patterns — they grew fast, but they were intentional about how they grew.
I started my own company in 2006 — a foreclosure counseling service. Everyone thought it was crazy because the market was hot. Then 2008 hit and we boomed. But I didn’t know how to scale. I kept hitting ceilings and eventually I broke. The company was fine. I broke.
So I sold it, became a student of scaling, and ended up in a COO seat. Then another one. Then another. I loved building things — I’d go into a company, spend 18 months building custom tools and language, get them stabilized, put an integrator in behind me, and move on.
How did you discover EOS?
I was on my third start-up and my CEO — we didn’t call her visionary and me integrator at the time, but that’s what we were — walked into my office and dropped something on my desk that said “V/TO” on top. I asked what it was. She said, “I think you’d like this.”
I looked down and there it was. All the stuff I had been building custom for every company over and over again, on a one- to two-page sheet of clarity.
I asked where she got it and she said, “It’s this book, Traction or something.” I downloaded it to my Kindle and stayed up until 3 AM reading it cover to cover.
It was like someone had taken my brain and put it into a framework. We self-implemented EOS and grew the business to a wildly successful exit.
You self-implemented first. What made you eventually start working with an Implementer?
After exiting that company, I went back to fractional integrator work. I knew the EOS format by then, so my build time had dropped from 18 months to 12. Then one day a new visionary I was working with read Traction in a night after we talked about some issues we were having, called EOS Worldwide the next morning, and said, “Suzy, we have to use this right now.” I told him it didn’t work like that — you have to sync the team, teach the tools. He’s a true visionary. He didn’t listen.
He got us connected with an Implementer and this guy takes us from me needing a year to 60 days. All the tools in place, rolling on EOS. I was blown away. From that point on, I never went into another company as an integrator without an Implementer. Because when your head is in the business, it’s really hard to say, “Team, let’s pull our heads out and go sit in a room for a whole day and work on the business.” Even after 14 years, I can still get sucked into the weeds sometimes trying to solve this exact problem because it always feels like you have to solve it before you can work on the bigger thing.
What made you decide to become an Implementer yourself?
I was rolling off an integrator project and called one of my Implementers to ask what he had for me. He said, “Suzy, why don’t you just become an Implementer? You love working with leadership teams. This is the way you can do that.”
I’d never really considered it. But once I started down the road, I realized EOS implementation is one of the most fulfilling things I’ve done in my career. I get to see the impact. And when a team avoids something, I can see that impact too — which forces me to be a better facilitator, because I’ll call them out when I see them making things easy on each other.
You kept integrating even after you became an Implementer. Why?
A client just begged me not to leave, and what I realized is that integrating made me a better Implementer. I wasn’t far removed from the actual day-to-day. I could use real examples. I could feel the pain of how hard it is to let someone go, or how heavy the P&L feels when it’s sitting on your back.
And the implementing side gave me all the rationale behind the tools — what really happens when you let a wrong person in the right seat stay on the team too long, or when you miss a scorecard metric for three weeks in a row and don’t do anything about it because there’s a reasonable-sounding reason every single week.
I feel very lucky that I get to sit on both sides and watch accountability from both sides. Because accountability is really what makes the difference.
You work with a lot of integrators. What are the challenges you see them face most often?
Every integrator has a superpower — usually one of the five roles. They’re great at special projects, or great at the P&L, or great at LMA (Leading, Managing, and holding people Accountable). You coach them on the piece they struggle with.
The integrators who are great with a P&L and understand the financial levers usually aren’t the best at having hard conversations. So you give them frameworks for not avoiding those conversations, because the more you avoid them, the harder they get. The integrators who are great at coaching sometimes don’t understand all the financial levers — they don’t need to know how to do the financials themselves, but they need to know how to pull the levers that get the results in alignment with the quarterly Rocks. Because Rock setting starts with your measurables: profit, revenue.
It’s the same dynamic as the whole leadership team. Everyone brings a different genius. The job is getting them to use each other’s genius to get the thing done.
Do you ever do both for the same client — integrate and implement?
No, and I wouldn’t recommend it for anyone. I could. But when you’re the integrator and you’re also facilitating, you have to think about the timing, the schedule, what’s coming next, what topics you need to teach. As the integrator, I want to be part of syncing with the team. Those two seats actually put you in conflict with each other.
You can do it. It just slows you down. The work of deepening into what the most important Rocks really are is not the same seat as the work of getting everybody committed to three to seven Rocks for the company. You have to sit in one seat or the other.
What’s the difference between installing EOS and actually living it?
You can use Rocks and Scorecards and they’re just tools. But when you bring them in intrinsically, when you can make them sticky — that’s the gap between learning EOS and living EOS.
When your team gets the discipline and the accountability around those decisions every single week, and you practice that together over and over again — it’s kind of like yoga. You’re not even on the same playing field as anybody else anymore, never mind your competition. The tools don’t fail your company. Teams fail because they don’t operationalize the tools consistently. That’s the gold.
If you had to pick the one EOS tool that makes the biggest impact, what would it be?
The Accountability Chart. Hands down. I’ve done over 300 Accountability Charts in my career and the patterns of success are clear when you get it right — and stick to it.
Building the tool isn’t the point. Living by it is. When you honor the Accountability Chart with the right people, core values matched, right seat, the skill set for those five roles — there’s nothing the team can’t do. One of the obstacles I see most often, especially when founders are moving from start-up to scaling, is they put bodies in the seats instead of the right people in the right seats. And they’re usually not the people who are great at having the hard conversations. That’s where a great integrator helps — someone who can hold firm on those conversations.
How do you get teams to actually live the Accountability Chart week to week, not just build it and check in on it quarterly?
You have to pull the whole show together. Rocks live over here, Scorecards live over there, the Accountability Chart lives over here — but when you tie them together, the Accountability Chart shows what each seat has to do on the Scorecard today, and what each seat should be working toward for the future of the company through Rocks.
When the person in the seat is focused on hitting their Scorecard numbers and hitting their Rocks every week, and we check in on it at the L10, then they’re living the chart. We’ve already decided the most important metrics for the seat and the most important things for the future of the company. Everything else works itself out. That’s what makes the team limitless.
You’ve used just about every tool out there — Bloom Growth, Ninety, EOS One, ClickUp, Asana, Trello, Zoho. What do you look for in software that supports EOS?
I used to build my own. I ran a software company. I built an entire business in Zoho. I used to teach project management classes on Trello. So when I say this, I say it from experience — the more features you have, the more hot water you get into if you’re not teaching the team how to use them together.
What Strety does is it lets you live in the tools without having to figure out all the stuff in your brain that has to go along with it. All the To Dos, how they tie into each other, moving from team to team.
Before Strety, how were you managing your work as an integrator?
I had my own personal Trello board that I built for leadership operations — and I want to be clear, that’s leadership operations, not product or service delivery operations. All my 1:1s, my People Analyzer notes, every leadership thing I had to track lived in my personal Trello. Then I’d transfer pieces of it into whatever tool the company I was working with was using.
So I had this whole shadow system running in my head and in Trello, just to keep my own integrator work organized.
The first time I really used Strety, I thought, “If somebody had built software for an integrator, this would be it.” All the To-Dos, how they tie into each other when you’re moving from one team to another, one person to another — it was finally in one place.
You mentioned Strety projects specifically. How do projects fit into your work as an implementer and integrator?
I stumbled into this accidentally. I was integrating for a company that had replaced a lot of their team with AI, and it was a little bit of a disaster — the visionary had run a CRM migration through AI, AI said it could be done in four weeks. Thousands of customers — four weeks. They hired someone on Upwork who promised they could hit the timeline, and nobody mentioned that after the migration you still have to train the staff, debug, iterate, and keep cleaning it up for two or three more months.
I came in after the fact. The company was burning down. I didn’t want to bring in another piece of software like ClickUp — they weren’t using anything like that. So I tried Strety Projects. I did a brain dump of what needed to get done, assigned it out, and it was so easy it was almost silly. I kept building on it until the whole project was mapped out to the leadership team, and they brought it down to their teams.
Now I do everything in projects. Even when I have a Rock, I put a project in, build the Rock out, and assign it. One place to go. The visibility makes me so much faster as an integrator — I can ping people, tag myself on things I want to keep up with, and know where everything is.
How does the Strety Projects view change what you can see as an integrator?
Everything in EOS is surrounded by accountability. You could have the best vision in the world, but without great people, you’re not going anywhere. And why are people great? Because they’re accountable. EOS doesn’t create accountability — it exposes whether you’re willing to have it.
So when I’m looking at a whole team, I can go through Projects in Strety really fast and see who’s accountable and who’s lacking accountability. The patterns show up immediately. And then I can go to my leaders and coach them — “Look at what’s going on in your team. Here’s what to watch for.” It teaches them how to see the patterns themselves.
That’s not a feature I went looking for. It’s something I fell into accidentally while using projects, and it’s become one of the most useful coaching tools I have as an integrator.
What kinds of projects do you typically build in Strety? Can you give some examples?
Rollouts are the obvious one — when you’re pushing something new out to the team, you want to make sure everyone’s trained, and we tag-team Strety Docs with Projects to do that. Marketing survey overhauls. Collecting client video testimonials, which sounds simple until you realize you have to figure out who you’re asking, what you’re asking them, and who’s shooting the video — suddenly it’s complex.
That’s actually the value. If the person managing the project doesn’t have a project management background, projects force them to think through what they need, what the steps are, and who can help. It teaches them project management by default. And on the high side, for someone managing a lot of balls in the air, logging into your home dashboard, clicking on yourself, and seeing everything assigned to you in one place — that was life-changing for me. It gave me the space in my brain to focus on my genius instead of remembering all the things I had to do.
Another Project that I’ve loved creating is a board for a Visionary to drop all their ideas. This is a great way to not only capture their genius, but also to strengthen the Visionary/Integrator relationship. Without cluttering up the Issues list, or letting ideas come in at the wrong place or time, the Visionary can simply place them on the board for the Integrator to check out and respond to when the time is right, and move it over to the Level 10 as an Issue that has a lot more context than a typical passing thought. It helps the Visionary know that they’re heard, and helps the Integrator more easily manage the deluge of ideas that come from great Visionaries.
How has Strety changed the way you actually run your sessions as an Implementer?
The biggest shift is in the Focus Day. We build out the Accountability Chart for the leadership team with the roles, and instead of doing it as a whiteboard exercise, I send everyone on break, build it right into Strety, and put it up on the wall.
It went from a messy whiteboarding session that’s all over the place to something clean — every seat visible, the five roles formalized, everything in one view. And the mindset shift that comes with seeing it in the software instead of on the whiteboard is real. I haven’t had a leadership team yet say we put the wrong person in the wrong seat after we made that switch. They commit to the five roles in that seat differently when they can see it cleanly. My sessions got more powerful and my leadership teams got more committed, just from that one change in how I run the exercise.
For someone who’s tempted to build their own system in Google Sheets or Docs, what would you tell them?
It’s the same reason you’d use EOS in the first place. I could custom-build EOS again if I needed to — probably better than I could before. But why would I, when somebody’s already done it, proven it, and done it at a level that works?
I had a client that decided to do their whole EOS implementation in Google Sheets. You can. But now you have to manage the Google Sheet. You have to govern it, teach people how to use it, and you’ve added another layer of management on top of the thing. With Strety, there are onboarding videos, there’s a record of who touched what, I can see who archived To-Dos that weren’t actually done.
If you’re a founder, why would you clean your own house? That’s not where your ROI is. Don’t spend your brain on the thing that’s going to take away from the thing you’re great at.